PFME - Updates and New Releases

[BarXQueen]

@lotechking89 You're not doing anything wrong. I've looked into it, and it's PFME's layout editor getting the size wrong, not your pictures. Upscaling them was the right thing to do.

There are two things going on. When you put a picture on the cabinet surface (the background), PFME stretches it to fill the space that's already there, whatever shape the picture is. A single-player layout is roughly square and your picture is the shape of your screen, so it gets squashed from the sides. That's the distortion.

The second one is the postage stamp. When you then insert another picture, PFME works out its size from how much it had to shrink the background picture. That's meant for pieces cut out of the background photo, so they drop back exactly where they came from. With a very high resolution background the shrink is big, so every picture you add afterwards gets shrunk by the same amount and squashed the same way. On a three-player cabinet it's worse, because a picture on the top box ends up setting the size for the player stations as well.

I'm fixing this for the next release. A picture you insert will keep its own shape and fit the machine you put it on.

Until then, this should get you going:

1. Click the cabinet surface. In the panel on the right, change Fit from Fill to Uniform. Your picture keeps its proper shape instead of being stretched (you may get a strip down the sides where the shapes don't match).

2. For each picture you insert, type the Width and Height you want into the same panel instead of trusting the size it arrives at. Keep the two numbers in the same proportion as the picture itself, or it will squash again.

3. If you'd rather it filled the space exactly, crop your pictures to the shape of the space before you import them. A single-player machine is close to square, each station on a three-player is a bit wider than it is tall (about 6 wide to 5 high), and the top box is a long strip about 6 times wider than it is high.

[BarXQueen]

PFME v0.3.10 New

• Hi-Tech machines now get much further. They pair with their coin mech, hopper and note reader and take coins, they play sound, and their buttons and lamps show the names the game itself gives them. Hi-Lo Hi-Lo now takes credits and plays. For Hi-Lo Hi-Lo, point your layout at `hilohilo_nondata.s19`: the other build stops on DPACK ERR because it wants a Datapak, which PFME does not have.
• If you line up a machine's reels or rename its symbols and then save the layout, those settings now go with the layout. Anyone you share it with sees the reels where you put them, not where they sit on your own PC.

Fixed

• On a cabinet with more than one player, each station can now use the same keys. Before, a key taken by one station was refused on the others, and a cabinet built by copying a station would not accept any keys at all. The Key Mapping window now groups its rows by station.
• A picture you insert or change no longer comes out squashed or stretched. On a cabinet with several stations, it now fits the station you are working on instead of the whole cabinet.
• If you swap a stretched background picture for one of a different shape, PFME now fits it without distorting it, and tells you how to stretch it again if you want to.
• The hopper now pays out at about 5 coins a second instead of 2, so a full bank no longer takes two minutes to empty.
• Hi-Tech reels no longer stop with a REEL ERROR during play or in the machine's own reel test.
• A Hi-Tech coin mech no longer stops answering after the machine restarts, which used to leave it showing NOT SET TO DES OR UNPLUGGED.
• A machine whose layout lists fewer reels than the board has now starts. Before, it sat at 0 MHz and never ran.

Worth knowing The first time you open each layout after updating, the machine starts up from its own memory instead of carrying on where you left it. Give it a minute to come up; after that it resumes as normal. Reported on the forum by players of the Hi-Tech and multi-player layouts. Download https://www.dadsfme.com/ec/pfme/PFME-Setup-latest.zip